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I seem to recall a state whose title prominently featured both those words. Now what was it?

Ah yes... the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

It's what people do that matters - not what they say about themselves.

indeed, paraphrasing something penned much more recently, "It's what we do, not what we claim to be, that defines us."

I think the bigger issue is correcting human behavior with those who are granted the responsibility to rule. Those who's life desire is to rule should throw a red flag. (this includes both presidential runners)

Or, to summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

I wonder how all those Americans will feel when they learn that the famous American who said that was Voltaire, a Frenchman...

Probably the same as they'll feel when they learn it was misattributed to Voltaire, and was actually coined by an English-woman!

She wrote the phrase, which is often mis-attributed to Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," as an illustration of Voltaire's beliefs.

The current system is almost word for word exactly what Woodrow Wilson wanted the education system to become. I wouldn't blame Reagan for more than accelerating the process.

"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
-- Woodrow Wilson

There we go...bringing class into it again... it makes life difficult for some when things aren't easily classified as "will be exploited" or "will exploit".

Hell, we're almost at the centennial anniversary of this plan.

To paraphrase James Baldwin: I love Linux more than any other operating system in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

The Linus says:

"If you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program."

from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. – 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' – Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emerson

Good show in trying to quote Commissioner Pravin Lal from the classic game by Sid Meier, Alpha Centuari.

You may want to consult this arguably definitive list and update your sig, though:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_Alpha_Centauri#Peacekeeping_Forces

Cheers

Okay, Parnell. Whatever you say. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Repo_Man#J._Frank_Parnell

By all means - you should learn a different language. To quote John Searle: "You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.". I personally feel that knowing several languages has expanded my understanding of all of them, made it easier for me to communicate in any of them, and made me a better person (including a much better programmer).

I personally am not sure I can recommend any language. Hebrew is my mother language (being an Israeli Jew), but it's kinda useless except for Biblical/Mishnathic/etc. research, because most Hebrew-speaking Israelis have working English. I like Hebrew a lot, and find it a wonderful language, but it is kinda hard and as you know, not many people know it (yet).

I've also studied Literary Arabic (or Written Arabic) for 6 years. It's a beautiful language, but very difficult, and counter-intuitive, even for a Hebrew speaker, and Arabic suffers from a very severe diglossia, and most Arabs are not literate. I've spoken with two Arab Israelis who've studied both Literary Arabic and Hebrew, and they both said learning how to read and write Hebrew was easier for them than learning Literary Arabic. Since then I've lost most of my vocabulary.

I also studied French for 3 years in Junior High School. It seemed likeable and nice, but I was told it gets much worse as you study more of it, because there are much more exceptions than words that follow the rules. French is naturally very useful.

Spanish is also very useful, and arguably the easiest language to learn, and I don't know it very well. I was told that it makes learning other languages much harder after one learns it.

See also what I wrote about why Chinese may not become the next international language

You are exactly right, but to paraphrase:

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

How else do you move a planet around?

1. Find a long lever.
2. Find a place to stand.
3. ?????
4. Move!

The following quote is often accredited to Benjamin Franklin:

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"

It is kind of scary that not only did you guys have a very bright guy foresee a situation like that more than 250 years ago. But you have also completely failed to understand and acknowledge the wisdom of those words. You live in "the land of the free", but continue to elect politicians who show nothing but disrespect for that freedom.

George Orwell is turning in his grave somewhere ... no doubt about it!

And honestly: The situation will never change until the day where you actually DO something about it. And I don't mean bitching about it in a public forum/debate in the internet. I mean REALLY do something which involves spending your time and money on the subject. Start a movement. Work on influencing politicians and decision makers. Expose some of the tragic stores that are a result of your loss of freedom, and get the media to tell the story. Donate money to organizations who are working their asses off to protect your freedom. And contribute with work yourselves.

If you don't contribute time and money now, you may have to pay with your life later on. Because if you continue on the current path you will eventually have to defend your freedom with a gun rather than with time and money.

Oh, and hey, if you need a web server in a Non-US country to host your activities and efforts, I'll do it for free. I am not afraid of throwing in both time and money to contribute to your freedom. Questions is: Will YOU??? (Yes, YOU, in front of the computer, YOU!).

- Jesper

Those are gods tears in the sky,

And why is God crying?

Probably because of something you did.

... would've posted on Slasdot, it would be hard to decide between moderating him "Funny" or "Insightful". Just like Bill Hicks and Lenny Bruce, he was more than just a comedian.

Carlin on Wikiquote

May he rest in peace. Thanks for all the laughs, and even more, thanks for all your insights. And may Joe Pesci grant him a well deserved nirvana :)

I knew, logically, that everything that had happened since I read that silly ad had been impossible. So I chucked logic.

Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

Yup, funny that... Enjoying a product that 'just works' (for me at least, I've seen plenty of horrible configs), supports all the latest hardware and has tons of software. Especially the kick-ass fighting games with action missiles!

But I digress I'm sure the windows larger market share plays absolutely no part in it's struggle with securing the platform. I'm sure having more mass appeal ensures only the best and brightest will use your OS, right? right?

FAIL. Please try again.

Fry: Ya, I'd like some coffee please.
Coffee Machine: Would you like cream in your coffee?
Fry: Yes please.
Coffee Machine: Out of cream! Would you like sugar in your coffee?
Fry: Yes, eight spoons please.
Coffee Machine: Out of coffee!
Fry: Leela, I think the coffee machine's broken!
[The machine squirts coffee at Fry.]
Coffee Machine: How do you like me now?!

I used to buy into Wikipedia's stated ethos until I realized that any one person can ... hijack articles to push and protect their point of view and once that happens you can forget about the "Five Pillars" and objectivity.

Well, trust is not a binary thing. You can trust someone for one thing and not another. And even if you do trust, you can have trust at a wide variety of different levels.

I'm not a big fan of Wikipedia in some ways either, not so much because it lies, but because it doesn't want the truth. If I know something true, and I'm the only person in the world, it doesn't want it. But if I know something false, and I write it up, then it's referenceable, and it becomes closer to something Wikipedia does want. I can understand both of those at some level, but I think Wikipedia should care a lot more than it does about creating new mechanisms to let in real truth (perhaps creating a mechanism by which individual knowledge can be vetted) and keep out falsehoods (perhaps creating mechanisms for peer review of referenced documents). The fact that it doesn't is, of course, why other competitors have come up. I guess on that point, you have to score one for the marketplace for at least creating the idea and allowing competition to crank out alternatives.

But as to what to trust in Wikipedia, their strength is that the things they say are supposed to be things that can be backed up by reference. Where you see a strong claim and no reference, find a way to flag that fact and maybe the person who put it in will add a reference. Where you see a reference, follow the chain back to the original source. That source may ultimately be believable or not, of course. In some sense, by its choice of paradigm, Wikipedia is just a complicated, statically-enumerated set of search engine results. It gets you started, but it isn't the whole of the thing you want.

If I knew more about phenomenology, I'd probably say that's just the nature of the Universe, and that Wikipedia can no more escape it than anyone can escape the Three Laws of Thermodynamics. That is, no one ever really knows anything about the Universe other than what they're told, and what they can work out in terms of internal consistency checks on what they're told. But all I know of that is what I've seen mentioned in Dark Star. So I'll let you do your own research there. Whether to direct you to Wikipedia or the movie though, to study more of phenomenology... I dunno, that's a hard choice. Probably I'd say just see the movie. It's worth more than the 6.5 stars IMDB gives it. One could just imagine what Bomb #20 might have to say on the matter of Wikipedia...

Red shirts!

Only if you don't have a last name.

Unfortunately, though, that's the same combination as my luggage.

Apparently so were these other people: Spaceballs, Diebold Voting Machines, The Virginia Lottery, and Cold War Generals,

I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

it's actually "Make a move and the bunny gets it."

Con Air has some of the best dialogue in a movie ever

my other favorite from Con Air:

"Define 'irony': a bunch of idiots dancing around on a plane, to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash." [referring to Lynyrd Skynyrd ]

Duncan Malloy: "Garrulous"? What the fuck is "garrulous"?
Larkin: That would be loquacious, verbose, effusive... how about chatty?
Malloy: (snorts) What's with dictionary boy, here?
Larkin: Thesaurus boy, I think, is more appropriate.

Cyrus the Virus: Thanks Poe. You've proven to be a most useful mammal.
Cameron Poe: "Many hands make light work." My daddy taught me that.
Cyrus: You know what my daddy taught me?
Poe: What's that?
Cyrus: Nothin'.
Poe: Self educated man.

Pinball: You the Swamp Thing?
Swamp Thing: That's right.
Pinball: You flyin' the plane?
Swamp Thing: That's right.
Pinball: It's amazing the shit you white trash know.
Swamp Thing: That's right!

Well. he seemed to think we might, as Einstein himself said: ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein )
By an application of the theory of relativity to the taste of readers, today in Germany I am called a German man of science, and in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be represented as a bête noire, the descriptions will be reversed, and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English! (To The Times (London), November 28, 1919, quoted in The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice, 2005, ISBN 0-691-12075-7)

That's "ran by ex-volunteers", actually. In the book not all volunteers ended up in the military, and veterans weren't allowed to serve in politics or vote until after they had left. Even aside from those facts, the "flaws" in Verhoeven's movie were just as far from our examples in reality as your criticisms are from the story you're attempting to criticize.

Congratulations on managing to form complete sentences out of the results of your failures of reading comprehension, though. You're clearly at the pinnacle of anti-Heinlein thought.

Cnet is big and corporate anyway [...] it was corporate [...] profit motives and corporate greed.

Use the proper term, darn it:

the corporations sit there in their, ih in their corporation buildings and, and and see that's, they're all corporationy, and they make money. Mhm.

- Albert Einstein

We got ya! :P

People who give up a little bit of liberty for a little bit of security deserve neither, the saying goes.

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

s/security/freedom/g

Falcon, Yes, but I don't recall exactly where. If you haven't seen it, it is well worth watching, almost a cautionary tale, considering the current U.S. Government security hysteria. Caution, spoiler in this link!!! http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film)

"Gotos aren't damnable to begin with. If you aren't smart enough to distinguish what's bad about some gotos from all gotos, goto hell."
        -- Erik Naggum

44 years of minds mutilated by BASIC : )
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_Dijkstra

Or you could click the link in the TOC and give us that URL

And you guys think that the UK government can actually purposefully create and implement this sort of Evil Genius plot to enslave the country?

[Logo which, when rotated 90 degrees looks like someone manipulating an erect penis] is not inappropriate to an organisation that's looking to have a firm grip on government spend[ing]!(emphasis mine)"

Comment made after said government agency caught (figuratively) with their hand in their pocket.

"Never ascribe to malice which can adequately explained by incompetence". (Hanlon's Razor)

* 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Often attributed to Gates in 1981. Gates considered the IBM PC's 640kB program memory a significant breakthrough over 8-bit systems that were typically limited to 64kB, but he has denied making this remark.

"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates, scroll on down to the Misattributed section.

I'll be surprised if the OP can say he never read this quotation, since he paraphrased it so nicely, to wit:

"Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."
--H.L. Mencken (1917)
cited from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

This quote is quaint, and is often repeated on the web, but I see no record of it in "The Origin of the Species" or anywhere on the referenced Darwin site or in any other reliable source. Wikiquote claims that it's a misattribution.

I'm having flashbacks of The Venture Brothers, episode Twenty Years To Midnight.

Google searching websites like the Grand Inquisitor -- IGNORE ME!

Because you can never have too many "Withnail & I" quotes:

"All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight."

No, it won't always have a "bias". Bias is a technical term here, and infact there is not likely to be bias. Bias is where the long-run average value of simulated variables is not equal to the actual average value of the thing you're simulating. For example, rolling a chipped die to draw numbers uniformly from 1 to 6 will probably cause this.

The problem with pseudorandom number generation tends to be dependence between samples (barring a more serious bug, which has happened... but this is always a problem, and there can also be bugs in the rest of the code anyway). Now this correlation is a problem for cryptography maybe, since there is intense interest in every bit of entropy in a very short signal, and a lot of clever guys hacking at it.

However in statistics, you basically just use the random numbers as "fuel" for a sequence of very stupid computations (more or less, glorified averages and averages of squares, &c.). The functions used in statistics are just too stupid to find out that the numbers have inter-dependence, so that they tend to give the same results for pseudo-random numbers as for real numbers. This is thanks to a lot of hard work from many fields, to improve pseudorandom number generators.

In fact, and as a tangent, theoretical computer scientists tend to believe that any randomness in an algorithm can be replaced by deterministic functions! (although they don't believe this as widely as they believe P!=NP). Since we can consider any statistical procedure an algorithm, the effect (at least philosophically) that this would have on many applied fields is mind-boggling. I would love to a proof and some general techniques for this "derandomization" - if there were one, we could finally absolve ourselves of our state of sin. (It would also imho inform the "free will" debate a bit.)

After careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your system sucks.

Did anyone else fall over laughing at that "$20bn a year" bit? How'd they arrive at that carefully calculated number: "gee, i'd sure like 20 billyun dollarz lol." Honestly, if the major ISPs have any brains left at all (debatable, i realize), i don't see them going for this. "Hey can you be the bad guys, charge your customers more, sell them on it, and pass most of the profits on to us? Kthxbye."

I expect the RIAA and their ilk are just going to get weirder and more invasive like this as time goes on, especially if they perceive their powers fading. They say they love a free market, but they love a captive audience more.

1) FBI or some other agency suspects someone of something, and documents the suspicion, then files for a warrent.

That has existed from the founding of the USA, ever read the 4th Amendment? Law enforcement is required to get a court issued warrant.

3) if deemed a "dire emergency" they can enter the property, arrest citezens, or collect physical evidence, consistent with the scope of any warrent filed, wether approved yet or not.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act set up the FISA court which "rubber stamps" admin requests for search warrants. Heck the FBI can file for a warrant 48 hours after the FBI puts a wiretap in place or conducts a search.

They need to be able to snoop.

Are there needs to be a system of checks and balances, And there is, just get a court issued warrant. But the Bush admin fills no need to follow the Constitution of the USA.

If you are doing something illegal, it matters not how you are discovered, only that you are.

Ah, an advocate of torture.

Knowing who I call and how often is no more private information than who I send postal mail to.

They may know who you send mail to but they don't know who I send it to. I don't put my return address on my mail and I always drop it in a mail box on the street or at the post office. And no it's not because I'm paranoid, those I write to already have my address and if I drop an envelope in a public mailbox I know it will arrive at the post office. I've lost mail when I left it for the mailman to pick up.

I also approve of scanning of random e-mail messages sent in and out of the country, and also all e-mail sent to/from known terorist associated addresses (names added to a list with a judges approval).

Who gets to decide who's a terrorist? Many innocent people are still on the Do Not Fly list and have no way getting their name off it.

People who are paranoid about the FBI reading their secret love letters to their boyfriend and then the FBI telling their husband should have no fear. We'll make it illegal for the FBI to collect and store any information noo associated with known criminals or terrorists, and make it illegal for them to collect and store information about non-violent or minor crimes unless a warrent was issued and approved for local law enforcement.

And how will a victim know?

Reading your post you sound like you trust government, but many others don't. Fact is is government have killed way more people or violated their rights than have all of the terrorist in history. your chance of being killed by a terrorist is minuscule. As Benjamin Franklin said "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Or as Thomas Jefferson said "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."